Elon Musk teased Twitter users a few days ago with the promise of information on Twitter's content moderation policies. Musk said he would be releasing what is known as "The Twitter Files" because users deserve to know what's really been going on behind the scenes.
On Friday night, the first part of The Twitter Files series was posted, revealing that high-level executives knowingly censored the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Story That Started It All
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post broke the news of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, an expose that used information retrieved from Hunter Biden's forgotten laptop.
The emails found on the laptop directly contradicts Joe Biden's claim that he never spoke to his son about any of his overseas dealings. In reality, Hunter had secured a meeting between then-Vice President Biden and a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm.
The knowledge of the meeting was contained in an email between Hunter Biden and Vadym Pozharskyi, an advisor on the board of Burisma. Their correspondence came around a year after Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board and was receiving a salary of approximately $50,000 a month.
Less than eight months after the correspondence, Joe Biden pressured the then Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, and Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, into firing a prosecutor who intended to investigate Burisma and conduct interrogations that would include Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden allegedly told the President and Prime Minister that if the prosecutor was not fired, he would not give them a $1 billion loan that he had promised them.
The prosecutor, of course, was fired.
Another email exchange revealed that shortly after joining the board, Pozharskyi began attempting to use Hunter Biden's political connections to benefit the company.
"We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc .to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions," he wrote.
The laptop also contained sexually explicit content of Hunter with an unknown woman as well as him smoking crack cocaine.
Related: Is Biden's Mental Capacity a Serious Issue?
The Censorship of The Hunter Biden Story
According to Matt Taibbi, author and the individual responsible for releasing The Twitter Files, Twitter executives knowingly squashed the story on Twitter, attempting to make it go away with claims the information in the story was retrieved via illegal hacking.
This decision, however, was allegedly made without informing then-CEO, Jack Dorsey.
Related: FBI Seizes $86 Million From Safe-Deposit Boxes, "Permanently Confiscated"
Other officials in the company were not sure how long they could keep up the facade that the story violated Twitter's hacking policy.
The former Vice President of Global Communications, Brandon Borrman, even questioned the validity of the violation.
A former employee admits that the hacking was the excuse, but everyone knew it wouldn't survive for long.
In another exchange between Vijaya Gadde, former trust and safety Chief Yoel Roth, and communications official Trenton Kennedy, Kennedy expresses his confusion with the freelance moderation.
Carl Szabo from the research firm NetChoice wrote a letter/report to the head of Public Policy, Lauren Culbertson, that exposes Democratic lawmakers' desire for additional moderation, regardless of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights.
Then CEO Jack Dorsey reportedly got involved in the situation eventually, but it is alarming how much was able to be done without his knowledge.
There are multiple instances of Dorsey jumping in and questioning censoring and moderating decisions, likely because they were made with political bias in mind.
Other sources said reported that the biggest issue was that in order for the censoring on the grounds of violating a hacking policy to be legitimate, there needed to be evidence that law enforcement actually found a hack.
Matt Taibbi will be continuing to post updates to his Twitter account and promises that information on shadow-banning, boosting, followed counts, and the fate of certain individual accounts will be coming soon.
